Hot Summer 2017 Trend: Actors Making Out With Themselves

Theroux, Fassbender, and Kyle MacLachlan all got in on the autoerotic action.

In the past few months, we've reached a national fever pitch of actors making out with themselves—a sorely needed advance in movie-making magic. Who needs casting directors to look for anything as archaic as "chemistry" with romantic scene partners, when you can use the magic of technology to have our hottest actors swap spit with their doppelgangers?

Take Alien: Covenant, a fine movie with some good scares and a surprisingly emotional performance from Danny McBride that really justifies its own existence with a brief scene of serious actor Michael Fassbender making out with himself. Fassbender plays (mostly) identical androids Walter and David, encountering each other for the first time on a distant world. Each entranced with the other, David tries to teach Walter how to play the flute, promising tenderly: "I'll do the fingering." David gingerly kisses Walter. Then he stabs him.

In the penultimate episode of HBO's The Leftovers, a hallucinatory, possibly spiritual near-death experience leads Justin Theroux's Kevin Garvey to embody two versions of himself. One of them is President of the United States, the other an assassin hired to kill the president before the launch of a nuclear weapon that would destroy the world. Of course, the two coming together in one room is what actually leads to the cataclysm, since President Justin needs to extract a key from Assassin Justin's still-living body. The episode leaves us with this image: Justin Theroux straddling himself and gingerly inserting a scalpel into his own torso, eyes wet and rolling back in his head, set to "God Only Knows." This extraction results in a grim, quietly joyful explosion. It's more erotic than most sex scenes.

Then there's the new season of Twin Peaks, in which Kyle MacLachlan plays three different versions of Special Agent Dale Cooper, including the Boy Scout original, the grossly mulleted doppelganger created by evil demon Bob, and Dougie Jones, the vacant-eyed, mute hero 2017 deserves (and whose identity the catatonic Cooper now inhabits). The camera lingers on each of these Coopers, and David Lynch repeatedly flashes back to the possessed Cooper staring at himself in the mirror—himself, but also Cooper, and also Bob. When the evil Cooper and Bob laugh hysterically, their faces inches apart, what do we think they're doing?

What's up with all of these dudes making out with themselves? There's a long history of this kind of erotic self-obsession, dating back to the myth of Narcissus, who died because he was too busy getting horned up by his own reflection. (The escape shuttle in the original Alien is even called the Narcissus.) But mythological special effects were, sadly, too primitive for Narcissus to ever actually get it on with himself, much to the dissatisfaction of legions of Greek citizens waiting for an exciting installment in their oral tradition.

In the time since we've been able to put actors on-screen with themselves, the technology has primarily been put to work to depict multiple members of the same family, which would introduce a whole separate level of complication to these situations. The purest example is something like Willow Rosenberg's alternate universe vampire doppelganger on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whohits on herself in a bit of foreshadowing about Willow's eventual coming out as gay. But of course, there's also the most important recent manifestation: James Franco longingly kissing himself, in a short film in which he is described as playing a "narcissist."

In contrast, the most interesting thing about the self-eroticism of 2017 is how unwilling the actors are to go fully in on the bit. None of them stink of narcissism, or at least not the cartoonish version of it. They're tentative, featuring actors plaintively brushing lips with their doppelgangers rather than anything with full tongue or, god forbid, a real sex scene—even though Theroux oozes disquieting chemistry with himself, it never really seems like they're going to go for it.

What's more, they're taking themselves fully seriously. Each of these scenes balances on a knife edge, threatening to devolve into pure terror at the drop of a hat. Two of them end in murder, and all of them are violent even as they are rather raw in their gesturing at eroticism.

There are all sorts of broad, soapy questions you could ask here: Can we ever truly know ourselves? Are we our own worst enemies? How do we recognize and neutralize the darkest elements of our own psyche? But the plaintive nature of these erotic doppelganger encounters suggests that David Lynch, Ridley Scott, and Damon Lindelof might just be grappling with the fact that any answer to a question this masturbatory is going to be at least a little horny. If you're going to live a fractured, split existence, you might as well go fuck yourself.